politics – Page 14

Review of Imager by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

SFFaudio Review

Imager (The First Book of the Imager Portfolio)
By L.E. Modesitt, Jr.; Read by William Dufris
2 MP3-CDs – 18 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 2009
ISBN: 9781400161805
Themes: / Fantasy / Magic / Politics / Coming of Age / Economics /
| MP3 Audio Sample |

L.E. Modesitt, Jr. has published over 50 novels, both science fiction and fantasy. Imager, his latest novel, is the first time his work has appeared on audio.

Imager is the start of a new fantasy series called “The Imager Portfolio”. It’s the story of Rhenn, who at the beginning is an apprentice portrait painter. In a life-changing event, he realizes two things: First, he can no longer continue in his profession, and second, he is an “imager” – a person who can make things real by visualizing them in his mind. Imagers are not common, but common enough to be feared and respected in Modesitt’s world.

After this, the novel takes it’s time in following Rhenn grow into his new-found ability. He climbs the ladder as an imager taking various and interesting training that use his ability in unique ways. My first thought was not that an imager would make a good bodyguard, but imaging something into a person’s body makes for quick defense – or a potent offense.

William Dufris is wonderful as always. The novel is not quick paced, as if Modesitt is using this volume to firmly create the world for future volumes. Dufris is as engaged a narrator while relating the details as he is during the exciting bits. A pleasure to hear!

Tantor will be publishing the next two volumes of this trilogy, and I will be listening!

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Review of Dune by Frank Herbert (Macmillan Audio)

SFFaudio Review

Dune
By Frank Herbert, Performed by Simon Vance
18 CDs – 22 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: 2007
ISBN: 9781427201430
Themes: / Science Fiction / Politics / Space travel / Culture / Ecology /

Dune. Arrakis. Desert Planet.

I first read Dune when I was in college (late 1980’s), after a few false starts. I desperately wanted to read it, so I made it the only thing I took with me on a 30 hour bus ride from Tucson, Arizona to Idaho Falls, Idaho. It was a long trip. I smelled like cigarettes. But I got that book read, and loved it.

Years later, I reviewed an unabridged recording of Dune for SFFaudio that was read by George Guidall. Loved that one, too. Revisiting the book was a treat and Guidall is the Yoda of audiobook narration, so win-win.

Now, years after that, I’ve heard yet another unabridged version of Dune, this time a multi-voice presentation from Macmillan Audio. And again, I loved it. Frank Herbert’s novel remains one of the finest examples of world-building the genre has to offer. The political intrigue is delicious, the implied history deep and satisfying, and the characters smart.

Simon Vance is the main narrator. Each character’s dialogue is performed by actors, and skilled actors at that. I can’t find a list of the entire cast, but it includes Scott Brick, Katherine Kellgren, Orlagh Cassidy, and Euan Morton. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The actors were allowed to perform, and most of the time the attributives were dropped. Vance’s narration bridges the conversations, and the book is immersive and engaging.

I’m not certain why, but there are long passages that Simon Vance narrates himself. Vance is right up there with Guidall, so it’s an excellent reading. I’m just not certain why the audiobook wasn’t done with a full cast all they way through. I point this out as a curiosity rather than a flaw.

A few short years ago, if a person had asked me if I prefer a single narrator to a full cast recording, there wouldn’t have been any hesitation. Single narrator, definitely. But now, I’d have a difficult time choosing between a full cast narration and a single narrator, assuming the single narrator is good, the actors in the full cast narration are good, and – this is very important – the attributives in the full cast narration are dropped so I don’t have to hear the maddening “he said angrily” after an actor has made it quite clear that a character is angry. The problem is that most full cast narrations lean too far toward audio drama, adding too much sound and music. I love audio drama, but audio drama and audiobooks are very different experiences. Most productions that aim somewhere between the two fail in my opinion. Because of this leaning, there aren’t many full cast narrations I’ve enjoyed, but this production from Macmillan Audio and anything from Full Cast Audio are top-notch.

Despite my enjoyment of Dune, I have never read past it. I can’t explain why. I’ve owned a copies of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune for years, but have never read them. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson published a book called The Road to Dune (SFFaudio Review), which presented the history of the creation of the Dune books. In there it said that Frank Herbert intended Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune to be one story. It’s long past time I try more of these novels. Lucky for me, all six of Frank Herbert’s original books have been completed and released by Macmillan Audio, all as full cast productions.

On to Dune Messiah!

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Review of Daemon by Daniel Suarez

SFFaudio Review

Daemon by Daniel Suarez Daemon
By Daniel Suarez; Read by Jeff Gurner
Audible Download – approx. 16 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks
Published: 2009
Themes: / Science Fiction / Cyberpunk / Techno-Thriller / Virtual Reality / Online Gaming / Politics /

Daemon‘s success as a self-published novel that crossed over to attain mainstream success is a testament to its cultural relevance, especially among the technorati. Suarez, who moonlights (sunlights?) as a systems analyst, promoted the novel to the movers and shakers in the technology community, Its positive reception even among this tech-savvy elite suggests that Daemon has its finger on the pulse of technological developments and their implications for politics and culture.

Daemon opens with the death of game developer Matthew Sobol, acclaimed developer of multiplayer games such as first-person shooter Over the Rhine and RPG The Gate, which bears a strong resemblance to World Of Warcraft. Some successful entrepreneurs leave money to their kids when they die, others give it all away to charity. Not Sobol. His legacy is the book’s eponymous daemon, a background process which through distributed computing has spread itself across the net and continues to carry out the developer’s will through a series of intricate commands. The capabilities of this daemon, and Sobol’s talent as a developer of artificial intelligence, become apparent when the police raid Sobol’s mansion in Thousand Oaks, California, and find themselves outclassed by a network of elaborate automated booby-traps, including an almost-sentient Humvee.

The novel pans cinematically between several characters who, in one way or another, become embroiled in the daemon’s plot, which ultimately proves to be global in scale. Dramatis personae include police detectives, government agents, a gamer, a laid-off fashion reporter, a white-hat hacker, ad a convict. It’s not clear from the outset whether these characters will become heroes or villains as the story progresses, and even when battle lines are more firmly drawn most of them still defy simple caricature, exhibiting complex motives and emotions.

The real show-stopper, of course, is the daemon itself, who possesses a high degree of intelligence and resourcefulness despite residing in lines of code. The novel’s conceit still demands the willing suspension of disbelief, but the concept and the technical specifics are so finely conceived and executed that the reader is left with a small but nagging suspicion that somewhere, sometime in a future that may be all too near, Daemon could become a reality. Suarez achieves this feat by investigating the wider political, economic, and social implications of a self-aware autonomous computer system.

The living Matthew Sobol embedded many elements of his daemon into his multiplayer games, and several characters venture into these online worlds in search of clues. These scenes are among the strongest in the book, and they carry favorable resonances with both the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and the simulator in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Like the virtual reality elements in these novels, the online gaming sequences in Daemon succeed because they maintain a strong causal relationship to events in the “real” world.

The action battle sequences in Daemon are high-octane, and like all good action sequences they manage to incorporate the book’s themes rather than standing as mere set pieces. For the most part, the protagonists are fighting against computer-controlled contraptions. Nevertheless, I felt that these ultimately visceral and superficial scenes occupy too much space in the novel, and detract from the book’s otherwise deep and intellectually stimulating themes. Paramount Pictures has optioned the movie rights for Daemon, and I shudder to think that the cultural significance of this novel may be boiled away, leaving only two hours of car chases.

The pacing of Daemon also leaves something to be desired. Suarez has revealed that a sequel is in the works, and the book’s cliffhanger ending promises an exciting continuation to the story. Lots of loose ends also remain dangling free, mostly in the arc of character development. The novel’s ending was certainly climactic, but it somehow failed to provide satisfactory closure. As I’ve said in other reviews, even books in a multi-volume series need to retain a high level of internal cohesion.

Jef Gurner’s narration for Daemon is spot-on. His performance is varied enough that each character’s unique identity extends into the aural sphere. Through some tricks of distortion, Penguin Audio has turned the dialogue of the daemon itself into a performance worthy of classic cinematic computerized villains.

Fans of cyberpunk in particular should consider Daemon essential reading, but any science fiction fan looking for an intriguing and visionary techno-thriller should add this audiobook to their summer reading list. The novel’s fascinating themes make it worth slogging through some scenes of gratuitous violence and tugging in vein on a few loose plot threads. Daemon is an impressive debut novel by Daniel Suarez, hopefully presaging an illustrious writing career.

Posted by Seth Wilson

LibriVox: The Beetle by Richard Marsh

SFFaudio Online Audio

LibriVox a panel from The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Attentive readers of Alan Moore’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen may have noted this panel…

…according to Jess Nevins, of The Fourth Rail, it depicts a “giant beetle in [a] vacuum tube.” and asserts that it

“is the Beetle, from Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). In that novel, a shapechanging Egyptian princess, who can take the form of a giant, malign beetle, a beautiful androgyne, and an old woman or man, pursues a vendetta against a British M.P.”

Prior to the release of The Beetle as a LibriVox audiobook I hadn’t even heard of it. But a little online research indicates that The Beetle came out the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and initially outsold it! How did I not hear of this book before?

The Beetle
By Richard Marsh; Read by various readers
48 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 11 Hours 56 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 24, 2009
A story about a mysterious oriental figure who pursues a British politician to London, where he wreaks havoc with his powers of hypnosis and shape-shifting, Marsh’s novel is of a piece with other sensational turn-of-the-century fictions such as Stoker’s Dracula, George du Maurier’s Trilby, and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. Like Dracula and many of the sensation novels pioneered by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, The Beetle is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters, a technique used in many late nineteenth-century novels (those of Wilkie Collins and Stoker, for example) to create suspense.

Podcast feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/the-beetle-by-richard-marsh.xml

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Lamentation by Ken Scholes

SFFaudio Review

SFFaudio Essential Lamentation
By Ken Scholes; Read by Scott Brick, William Dufris, Maggi-Meg Reed, and Stefan Rudnicki
12 CDs – 15 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: 2009
ISBN: 9781427206251
Themes: / Fantasy / Epic Fantasy / Religion / Politics /

A pillar of black smoke rises from the plains where the ruins of a city lie. Four people watch it. Petros, an old fisherman; Nebios, a boy who is the only eyewitness; Rudolfo, the Gypsy King and Lord of the Ninefold Forest; and Jin Lee Tam, consort of a powerful madman. Each takes up the story in turn and we learn as they do what has happened and what changes it bodes for the Named Lands.

Through their eyes, Ken Scholes masterfully unfolds layer upon layer of complexity to reveal an epic tale of the struggle not only for power but to serve the Light. This struggle between vengeance, knowledge, mercy, and justice is what drives the main characters. Scholes takes us into a world where Machiavellian politics are constantly intertwined between characters’ motivations. However, because he uses interesting characters to tell his story, it always feels personal and we realize the “epic” quality only as we look back over storyline development. As well, he skillfully manipulates these believable people (and, let us admit it, his readers as well) so that I literally went from worrying about one character being killed to hating him to coming back into sympathy and understanding again by the end of the book. In the end, what we see is that despite epic qualities, the question the book is asking is a simple one. Who was the evil mastermind that destroyed Windwir and why?

Scholes’ world is a mesh of societies that come from disparate sources but which blend seamlessly into an intriguing whole. Reminiscent of medieval times are the city-states and trading factions wielding great power. The people of the Ninefold Forests put one in mind of Robin Hood with their wood-wise ways that shun large, established cities. The Church has a pope and an Androfrancine order that seeks ceaselessly to acquire knowledge and store it for the common good. This too hearkens back to our historical past, yet there are also distinct elements informing us that this is instead a distant future after mankind’s knowledge was used to wreak a terrible calamity resulting in The Time of Laughing Madness. There is a distinctive steam-punk flavor to be found in the inventions that are discovered and released by the monks into general society.

This is a world in which long distance communication is done by messenger bird but where robots exist (mecho-servitors). As well as spoken, coded conversation, there is a fascinating finger tapping code used by those in the know. We also meet one of the mecho-servitors, Isaak, whose suffers from extreme guilt over possibly being used for the destruction and who seems to be developing a soul.

Finally, although we breathlessly follow the characters on their journeys, knowing that there are several books to follow in the series, Scholes does us the courtesy of tying up the story lines for all but a very few situations. This was extremely refreshing and much appreciated. Simultaneously, he opened a few intriguing threads of possibility that lead us to eagerly await the next novel. True to the mastery that we saw in the rest of the book, he does so with a few well written scenarios that leave the reader realizing that these are situations that were hinted at but essentially “hidden in plain sight” until the author decided to pull them into use.

Narration was brilliantly voiced by Stefan Rudnicki, Scott Brick, William Dufris, and Maggi-Meg Reed. All were perfect for their parts, with Brick doing the heavy lifting on any sections told from a point of view that came from other than the main four characters. What I found most interesting was the opportunity for comparison between how the four readers interpreted different characters. The book changes point of view between characters by stating the person’s name and then using what might be called over-the-shoulder story telling in third person from that point of view. Therefore, each of the narrators is called upon to do dialogue for various characters as they engage in conversation with the protagonist of the moment. Hearing how each interpreted Isaak’s robotic voice or Petros’s aged tones provided fascinating contrasts.

Highest recommendations go to this audio book and author Ken Scholes.

Posted by Julie D.

Review of Stonefather by Orson Scott Card

SFFaudio Review

Stonefather
By Orson Scott Card; Read by Emily Janice Card
Audible Download – 3 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
Themes: / Fantasy / Magic / Nature / Politics / Youth /

Runnel is nothing special. He was never good at anything nor exceptionally bad at anything, just plain ordinary. He is frequently beat by a just as frequently angry father. He lives in a house with more than a dozen children. “Runnel” is a water name, which he was given out of piety to the god Yegut. Even though he has a water name, the only thing that Runnel is better than the other children at is rock climbing. He can find footholds and crevices where other children can’t.

As Runnel approaches his “man height” the other kids begin playing mean jokes on him. During one of these jokes Runnel finds himself on the top of a mountain all alone looking at a road heading to Mitherhome, the city of water mages. He decides to leave and starts to walk towards Mitherhome which is an island surrounded by a deep gorge in the land. He walks to the town of Hetterfairy, the only way to get to Mitherhome. Here he meets a servant named Lark who becomes his first friend. Runnel persuades her to take him to her masters house where he gets a job and discovers something amazing about himself.

This book is written by Orson Scott Card and is read by his daughter Emily Janice Card. Orson Scott Card is the famous award-winning author of the Ender series, Bean Series, and the Earthfall Series. “Stonefather” is a story set in a series he is writing, an introduction you might say.

Emily Janice Card read this book amazingly. This is the first audio book that I have heard that she has read and I was pretty surprised. She is not the best reader in the world but she is very very good. I could see the same voice in all the characters but this did not distract me from the story.

Card’s clever use of words had me from the beginning as all of his books do. I could tell each character not only from their voice but from their style of words. Some had very similar styles but there was always a little tweak in it that I could see and it made it all the better. I dislike books in which I can not tell who is speaking.

Posted by DanielsonKid (Age 14)